The Duel Read online

  XIII

  Laevsky received two notes; he unfolded one and read: “Don’t go, my good man.”

  Who could have written that? he thought. Certainly not Samoylenko … And not the deacon, seeing as he doesn’t know I want to leave. Could it be Von Koren, then?

  The zoologist sat hunched over the table drawing a pyramid. It seemed to Laevsky that his eyes were smiling.

  Doubtless, Samoylenko has blabbed …, Laevsky thought.

  On the other note, in that same kinked penmanship with long tails and flourishes, was written:

  “Someone’s not leaving on Saturday.”

  A foolish mockery, Laevsky thought. Friday, Friday …

  Something caught in his throat. He touched his collar and coughed, but instead of a cough, a laugh escaped.

  “Ha—ha—ha!” he burst out laughing. “Ha—ha—ha!” What am I doing? he thought. “Ha—ha—ha!”

  He tried to contain himself, covering his mouth with his hand, but the laughter pressed against his chest and neck, and his hand couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  Really, how foolish this is! he thought, roaring with laughter. Have I lost my mind, is that it?

  The laughter rose higher and higher and turned into something resembling the yapping of a lapdog. Laevsky wanted to rise from the table but his legs would not respond, and for some strange reason his right hand bounced around the table out of his control, fitfully snatching at pieces of paper and crumbling them. He saw the astonished looks, Samoylenko’s serious startled face and the zoologist’s glare, filled with cold mockery and revulsion, and he understood that he was in a state of hysteria.

  What a scandal, what shame, he thought, feeling the warmth of tears on his face … Oh, oh, what a disgrace! This has never happened to me before …

  Now they bore him by the arms and, supporting his head, led him away somewhere; now a glass flashed before his eyes and knocked against his teeth, and water spilled over his chest; now a small room, two beds close together in the middle, covered with clean blankets as white as snow. He fell onto one of the beds and burst out sobbing.

  “It’s nothing, it’s nothing …” Samoylenko said. “It happens … It happens …”

  Chilled by fear, her entire body shaking and sensing something terrible, Nadezhda Fyodorovna stood beside the bed and asked:

  “What’s wrong with you? What? For God’s sake, speak …”

  Could Kirilin have written something to him? she thought.

  “It’s nothing …” Laevsky said, laughing and crying. “Leave here … my dove.”

  His face expressed neither hatred nor disgust: which meant he knew nothing. Nadezhda Fyodorovna calmed down a bit and returned to the drawing room.

  “Don’t worry, darling!” Maria Konstantinovna said to her, sitting down beside her and taking her by the hand. “This shall pass. Men are just as weak as we are sinful. It’s understood … that right now you both are going through a crisis! Well, darling, I expect an answer. Let’s go have a talk.”

  “No, we will not talk …” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, heeding Laevsky’s sobs. “I’ve melancholy … Please, allow me to leave.”

  “What’s this? What’s this, darling?” Maria Konstantinovna distressed. “Did you really think that I would let you go without supper? Have a bite, then go with the lord.”

  “I’ve melancholy …” whispered Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and, so as not to fall, gripped the armrests of the armchair in both hands.

  “He’s having convulsions!” said Von Koren cheerfully, entering the drawing room, but upon seeing Nadezhda Fyodorovna grew embarrassed and left the room.

  When the hysterics had finished, Laevsky sat on the stranger’s bed and thought:

  What a disgrace, I bawled, like a girl! Most assuredly, I’m a laughingstock and abominable. I’ll have to exit through a pitch-black passage. However, that would mean, that I am attributing serious meaning to my hysterics. It would follow, that I should play it off as a joke …

  He looked himself over in the mirror, sat for a bit and walked into the drawing room.

  “Well, here I am!” he said, smiling; he was tortuously embarrassed, and he sensed that others were embarrassed by his very presence. “These things do happen,” he said, taking a seat. “I was just sitting here, and suddenly, wouldn’t you know, I felt a frightful stitch in my side … unbearable, my nerves could not withstand it and … and this foolish thing came out. Our nerve-racking era, there’s not a thing to do about it!”

  He drank wine with his supper, conversed and, on occasion, would jerkily gasp, gently stroking his side, as though demonstrating that the pain was still felt. And there was no one, except Nadezhda Fyodorovna, who believed him, and he saw this.

  In the tenth hour they went for a walk along the boulevard. Nadezhda Fyodorovna, fearing that Kirilin would try to strike up a conversation with her, tried to stay close to Maria Konstantinovna and the children the whole time. She had been weakened by fear and melancholy, and, with the presentiment of fever, languished and was barely able to move her legs, but she would not go home, such that she was certain she would be followed either by Kirilin or Achmianov, or both. Kirilin walked behind, alongside Nikodim Aleksandrich, and hummed in a low voice:

  “I won’t allo-ow myself to be to-oyed with! I won’t allow it!”

  They turned off the boulevard toward the pavilion and walked along the embankment, and for a long time looked out at the phosphorescence of the sea. Von Koren began explaining what makes it phosphorescent.

  XIV

  “Nonetheless, it’s time for me to play Vint … They’re expecting me,” Laevsky said. “Farewell, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “And I’m with you, hold on,” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, and took him by the arm.

  They bid farewell to the company and were on their way. Kirilin also bid farewell and proceeded alongside them; he was going the same way, he said.

  Whatever will be, will be …, Nadezhda Fyodorovna thought. Let it be …

  It appeared to her that every bad remembrance had left her head and now walked through the darkness beside her and breathed heavily, as if she were a fly that had fallen into ink, crawled along the pavement using all its strength and sullied Laevsky’s side and arm with black. If Kirilin, she thought, did anything stupid, then the blame would lie not with him but with her alone. Indeed, there had been a time when not a single man would have spoken to her in such a manner as Kirilin, and she herself had sheared that time, as you would a thread, and had ruined it irrevocably—who could possibly be to blame here? Inebriated by her own desires, she’d begun smiling at this man who was a total stranger only because, apparently, he was stately and tall in height, then after two rendezvous he had bored her, and she had dumped him, and is this truly the reason—she thought now—that he had the right to behave however he liked with her?

  “Here, my dove, is where I say goodbye to you,” Laevsky said, stopping. “Ilya Mikhailich will see you the rest of the way.”

  He bowed to Kirilin and quickly walked across the boulevard, proceeding along the street to the home of Sheshkovsky, where the windows were aglow, and the sound of his clanking the gate followed.

  “Allow me to explain myself to you,” Kirilin began, “I’m not a little boy, not some sort of Atchkasov or Latchkasov, Zatchkasov … I demand serious attention!”

  Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s heart began to pound. She answered to nothing.

  “I initially attributed the severe change in your attitude toward me to coquettishness,” Kirilin continued, “but now I see that you’re simply incapable of relating to decent people. You simply wanted to play with me, as you did with that Armenian boy, but I am a decent person and I demand that I be treated as a decent person. Thus, I am at your service …”

  “I’ve melancholy …” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, and began to cry, and turned away to hide her tears.

  “I too have melancholy, but what is to be done about it?”

  Kirilin was silent for a moment
, then spoke precisely, with deliberateness:

  “I’ll repeat myself, my good lady, that if you do not grant me a rendezvous today, then this very day I will start a scandal.”

  “Release me this day,” Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, not recognizing her own voice, as it had become so extremely piteous and thin.

  “I must teach you a lesson … Please forgive the vulgar tone, but it is imperative that you be taught a lesson. Yes, milady, unfortunately I must teach you a lesson. I demand two rendezvous: today and tomorrow. The day after tomorrow you are completely free and may go to the four corners of the earth with whomever it is you choose. Today and tomorrow.”

  Nadezhda Fyodorovna had reached her own gate and stopped.

  “Release me!” she whispered, her whole body shaking and seeing nothing before her in the darkness save for a white service jacket. “You are correct, I am a horrible woman … I am to blame, but release me … I’m asking you …” She reached out for his cold hand and shuddered … “I’m begging you …”

  “Alas!” Kirilin drew a long breath. “Alas! It isn’t in my plans to release you, I only want to teach you a lesson, to make you understand, and by the way, madam, I have very little faith in women.”

  “I’ve melancholy …”

  Nadezhda Fyodorovna listened to the repetitive noise of the sea, looked up at the sky sprinkled with stars, and she had the desire to promptly end everything, and to be rid of the accursed sensation of life by this sea, these stars, these men, this fever …

  “Only not in my home …” she said coldly. “Take me somewhere.”

  “Let’s go to Muridov’s. That’ll be best.”

  “Where is that?”

  “By the old seawall.”

  She quickly walked along the street and then turned in to the side street that led to the mountains. It was dark. Here and there along the pavement lay pale, luminous stripes from illuminated windows, and it seemed to her that she, like a fly, either found herself immersed in ink or crawled out of it into the light. Kirilin walked behind her. At one point, he stumbled, nearly fell over and burst out laughing.

  He’s drunk …, thought Nadezhda Fyodorovna. Either way … either way … Let it be.

  Achmianov also excused himself from the gathering in a hurry and followed the trail of Nadezhda Fyodorovna, so that he could invite her to go for a boat ride. Nearing her house, he peered through the small front garden: the windows were wide open, no flame shone.

  “Nadezhda Fyodorovna!” he called out.

  A minute passed. He called out again.

  “Who’s there?” Olga’s voice was heard.

  “Is Nadezhda Fyodorovna home?”

  “She’s not here. She hasn’t returned yet.”

  That’s strange … Very strange, Achmianov thought, beginning to feel a powerful unease. “She went home …”

  He walked along the boulevard, then along the street and glanced in Sheshkovsky’s windows. Laevsky was sitting at the table without his frock coat and attentively gazed into his cards.

  “Strange, strange …” muttered Achmianov, and faced with the recollection of the hysterics that had occurred with Laevsky, he became embarrassed. “If she’s not home, then where is she?”

  He once again returned to Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s chambers and looked at the dark windows.

  This is deceit, deceit …, he thought, remembering that she herself had met him at noon that day at Bityugov’s and had promised that they would take a boat ride together in the evening.

  The windows of the house where Kirilin lived were dark, and at the gateway a policeman sat on a little bench and slept. Everything became clear to Achmianov when he looked at the windows and the policeman. He decided to go home, and went on his way, but again wound up near the chambers of Nadezhda Fyodorovna. He sat down on a little bench there and removed his hat, feeling that his head was aflame with jealousy and hurt.

  The town church bells rung the time only twice in the twenty-four-hour cycle: at noon and at midnight. Right after they’d tolled midnight, hastened steps could be heard.

  “This means once again tomorrow evening at Muridov’s!” Achmianov heard, and recognized Kirilin’s voice. “At eight o’clock. Goodbye, milady!”

  Nadezhda Fyodorovna appeared near the little front garden. Not noticing that Achmianov sat on the bench, she passed him as a shadow, opened the little gate and, leaving it unlatched, entered her home. She lit a candle in her room, quickly undressed, but did not get into bed, instead got down on her knees before a chair, embraced it and pressed her forehead against it.

  Laevsky returned home in the third hour.

  XV

  Having decided not to lie all at once, but in parts, the next day in the second hour, Laevsky went to Samoylenko to ask for the money, so that Saturday he may leave without fail. After yesterday’s hysterics, which added a sense of biting shame to the already heavy state his soul was in, staying in town was unthinkable. If Samoylenko would insist on his conditions, he thought, perhaps it would be possible to agree to them and take the money, but tomorrow, minutes before his departure, say that Nadezhda Fyodorovna had refused to go; from this evening on it could be possible to convince her that everything was being done for her own good. But if Samoylenko, finding himself blatantly under Von Koren’s influence, completely refused the money or requested some new condition, then he, Laevsky, would set off on a cargo ship that very day, or even a sailing vessel, to New Athos or Novorossiysk, and from there he would send his mother a self-effacing telegram and then live there for as long as it took his mother to dispatch money for the road.

  Arriving at Samoylenko’s, he found Von Koren in the drawing room. The zoologist had only just arrived for dinner and, according to habit, having opened the album, scrutinized the men in top hats and ladies in bonnets.

  How inopportune, Laevsky thought, seeing him. He may interfere. “Hello!”

  “Hello,” Von Koren answered, without looking up at him.

  “Is Alexander Davidich home?”

  “Yes. In the kitchen.”

  Laevsky proceeded to the kitchen, but at the door, seeing that Samoylenko was busy with the salad, returned to the drawing room and sat down. He always felt awkward in the presence of the zoologist, and now he feared that he would have to talk about his hysterics. Over a minute passed in silence. Suddenly, Von Koren raised his eyes to Laevsky and asked:

  “How are you feeling after yesterday?”

  “Superb,” Laevsky answered, reddening. “In actuality, it was really nothing out of the ordinary …”

  “Until yesterday I had understood that hysteria only occurred with the ladies; that’s why I initially thought that you were doing the dance of Saint Vitus.”

  Laevsky smiled ingratiatingly and thought:

  How indelicate he’s being for his part. He knows perfectly well that I’m going through a difficult time … “Yes, it was a funny affair,” he said, continuing to smile. “I laughed about it the entire morning today. It’s curious that in the throes of a hysterical fit, what you know becomes absurd, and you laugh at it from your soul while crying at the same time. In our nerve-racking era we are slaves to our nerves; they are our masters and do with us what they please. Civilization has proven to be a bearish hindrance, in this case …”

  Laevsky spoke, and he found it unpleasant that Von Koren was seriously and attentively listening to him and attentively watching him, unblinking, indeed studying him; and he felt annoyed at himself that, not taking into account his lack of love for Von Koren, he just couldn’t rid his face of that ingratiating smile.

  “Still, I must confess,” he continued, “there were more immediate reasons for the fit and rather sound ones. Recently my health has been seriously shaken. Add to that the ennui, a perpetual lack of money … the absence of likeminded people … I’m in a governor’s predicament.”

  “Yes, there’s no way out of your predicament,” Von Koren said.

  Those calm, cold words, embodying not just mockery
, not just a gratuitous prediction, were insulting to Laevsky. He remembered the expression on the zoologist’s face yesterday, full of mockery and revulsion, and didn’t stay quiet for long and, no longer smiling, asked:

  “And how is it that you are aware of my predicament?”

  “You were just speaking of it yourself, yes, and your friends take such a burning interest in you that all day long, all one hears is what’s going on with you.”

  “What friends? You mean Samoylenko?”

  “Yes, him too.”

  “I should really ask Alexander Davidich and my friends in general to talk less about me.”

  “Here comes Samoylenko; why don’t you ask him to be less concerned with you.”

  “I don’t understand your tone …” Laevsky muttered; he was seized by the sensation that he only just now realized that the zoologist hated him, found him contemptible and sought to humiliate him and that the zoologist was his bitterest and most uncompromising enemy. “Save that tone for someone else,” he said quietly, not having the energy to speak louder from the hatred that now kneaded at his chest and neck, as the desire to laugh had yesterday.

  Samoylenko entered without his frockcoat, sweaty and scarlet from the sweltering kitchen.

  “Well, look who’s here?” he said. “Hello, my good man. Have you had dinner? Don’t stand on ceremony, answer me: have you dined?”

  “Alexander Davidich,” Laevsky said, rising, “if I turn to you with an intimate request, that does not mean that I’ve freed you from the responsibility of discretion and respect for another’s secret.”

  “What’s the matter?” Samoylenko said, taken aback.

  “If you don’t have the money,” Laevsky continued, raising his voice and shifting from one leg to the other in agitation, “then don’t give it, refuse, but why preach at every intersection that there is no way out of my predicament, and the like? I can’t stand this benevolence or friendly favors that are a kopeck’s worth of doing, at a ruble’s worth of talk! You can boast of your benevolence however much you choose, but no one has given you the right to reveal my secrets!”